books.google.com - Throughout the period when Freud wrote his major works, various translations and editions, differing widely in the accuracy of their texts and the quality of their content, made their appearance. Increasingly, as the body of Freud's work achieved command stature, the need arose for a definitive and uniformly...https://books.google.com/books/about/An_Outline_of_Psycho_analysis.html?id=OwXZMEVr5dgC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareAn Outline of Psycho-analysis

An Outline of Psycho-analysis

Throughout the period when Freud wrote his major works, various translations and editions, differing widely in the accuracy of their texts and the quality of their content, made their appearance. Increasingly, as the body of Freud's work achieved command stature, the need arose for a definitive and uniformly authentic English language edition of all his writings. The Standard edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was undertaken to achieve this goal. The work is under the general editorship of James Strachey and he himself has made new translations of many of the writings....The result is to place this edition in a position of unquestion supremacy over all other existing versions -- which are in fact rendered obsolete. 'An outline of psycho-analysis' is the last book that Sigmund Freud wrote. A masterpiece of clarity and conciseness, it has a unique value in relation to all of Freud's work, for it is both a manual for the layman on the fundamental tenets of psycho-analysis, and a summary of the principles arrived at after a lifetime of research and experiment in the science of psychology.

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LibraryThing Review

User Review - petterw - LibraryThing

What a brilliant scientist Freud was! And how eloquent he puts forward his views. At times the arguments are weathered by time, but no doubt this book represents the most important thoughts in the history of psychology.Read full review

LibraryThing Review

User Review - NielsenGW - LibraryThing

One must be careful when reading Freud—every once in a while, he makes a little bit of sense and the reader may follow him down his blind alleys. An interesting albeit unsupportable treatise, good ...Read full review

About the author (1989)

Sigmund Freud was the founder of psychoanalysis, simultaneously a theory of personality, a therapy, and an intellectual movement. He was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Freiburg, Moravia, now part of Czechoslovakia, but then a city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the age of 4, he moved to Vienna, where he spent nearly his entire life. In 1873 he entered the medical school at the University of Vienna and spent the following eight years pursuing a wide range of studies, including philosophy, in addition to the medical curriculum. After graduating, he worked in several clinics and went to Paris to study under Jean-Martin Charcot, a neurologist who used hypnosis to treat the symptoms of hysteria. When Freud returned to Vienna and set up practice as a clinical neurologist, he found orthodox therapies for nervous disorders ineffective for most of his patients, so he began to use a modified version of the hypnosis he had learned under Charcot. Gradually, however, he discovered that it was not necessary to put patients into a deep trance; rather, he would merely encourage them to talk freely, saying whatever came to mind without self-censorship, in order to bring unconscious material to the surface, where it could be analyzed. He found that this method of free association very often evoked memories of traumatic events in childhood, usually having to do with sex. This discovery led him, at first, to assume that most of his patients had actually been seduced as children by adult relatives and that this was the cause of their neuroses; later, however, he changed his mind and concluded that his patients' memories of childhood seduction were fantasies born of their childhood sexual desires for adults. (This reversal is a matter of some controversy today.) Out of this clinical material he constructed a theory of psychosexual development through oral, anal, phallic and genital stages. Freud considered his patients' dreams and his own to be "the royal road to the unconscious." In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), perhaps his most brilliant book, he theorized that dreams are heavily disguised expressions of deep-seated wishes and fears and can give great insight into personality. These investigations led him to his theory of a three-part structure of personality: the id (unconscious biological drives, especially for sex), the superego (the conscience, guided by moral principles), and the ego (the mediator between the id and superego, guided by reality). Freud's last years were plagued by severe illness and the rise of Nazism, which regarded psychoanalysis as a "Jewish pollution." Through the intervention of the British and U.S. governments, he was allowed to emigrate in 1938 to England, where he died 15 months later, widely honored for his original thinking. His theories have had a profound impact on psychology, anthropology, art, and literature, as well as on the thinking of millions of ordinary people about their own lives. Freud's daughter Anna Freud was the founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic in London, where her specialty was applying psychoanalysis to children. Her major work was The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936).